I'm trying to upgrade the BOINC computing performance of my S5000PSL server board with a recent nVidia / CUDA graphics card. I just bought a GFX550 Ti but this is not being recognized by the motherboard at all in either of the PCI-E v1 x16 (x8 electrical) slots.

Can anyone help me get this card working or otherwise point me in the direction of the most recent graphics card that is compatible with the S5000PSL?

Thanks for the tip John. Unfortunately that list hasn't been updated since 2008. I've done some more research and I gather from this excellent post that many but not all modern graphics cards do have a compatability mode for PCI-E version 1.x. I guess Asus doesn't as the ASUS ENGTX550 I bought shows not sign of life on my S5000PSL with latest BIOS. I'm looking to try an MSI card now as they at least state PCI-E v1.1 backwards compatability on their product pages.

Unfortunately same behaviour as my Asus GTX560, no recognition by Windows 7 or the driver which again states no compatible card found.

I'll open a ticket with MSI as I have with Asus but hopefully somewhere here can point out whether it's an S5000 specific issue. I have the latest BIOS, which I assume makes the motherboard follow the PCI 1.0a standard very closely?

Thanks for the tips. The BIOS was pretty much default, although I did try setting onboard video to disabled, which didn't help and I had to reset the BIOS to get a head back. In the BIOS > PCI configuration I just tried setting

Memory mapped I/O above 4GB -> Enabled

Dual Montior video -> Enabled

But still the GTX9800GTX+ isn't recognized at all. I'm pretty sure that most PCIe Gen 2 cards won't work. Your GeForce 7000 series cards are all PCIe Gen 1. I guess the highest this motherboard will go is a GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra i.e. nVidia codename G80, but I'd love to be proved wrong!

BTW, you can get later generation graphics technology on this board through the good old PCI interface. I am now running a PCI Radeon 5450 on this board and I'm pretty sure a GT430 or GT520 (both available with PCI 2.2 interface) would work too.

I have a few Intel S5000PSL laying around and end up put together as a few workstations.

The only thing i need to do is disable the onboard video in the bios, and update the board bios so it compatible with windows 7. I'm running the following graphic card with no issues on windows 7 64bit.